On 15 March 2022, I was on a video call with a dear friend when I experienced a twitching on the left-hand side of my face and a slurring of my speech. My wife, Fiona, took me to hospital because we both thought I was having a stroke, and I spent the journey in the car adjusting to my probable death. Interestingly, I did not feel fear or anger; only sadness and disappointment that it was all going to end sooner than I had expected. I survived: but six days later, we learned that the cause of my condition was a particularly aggressive form of brain tumour called a glioblastoma.
Since then I have read a number of accounts written by cancer sufferers. Many of them start with an uncertain diagnosis, often with a reasonable percentage chance of survival. But unlike these accounts it was absolutely clear that the tumour would kill me: there was no cure and I was given a median life expectancy of 15 to 18 months. Of course, I hoped to do better than the median, but the medical team said that clinging to that possibility would probably be a mistake because it would distract me from enjoying the time I had left. My immediate reaction was genuinely to recognise that in some respects I was lucky. Some people drop dead with no warning, whereas I would perhaps have a year to come to terms with and make sense of my life. This enabled me from the beginning to take a positive approach to my situation and determined me to make the most of the little time I had.
My first thought was to write an autobiography which would be mainly for me and my family and friends and would help me think through some of my personal idiosyncrasies. But then I realised that I had devoted much of my life to tackling climate breakdown and had been entrusted with pivotal roles in the UK and European Union, advising ministers and leading negotiations. I was for many years at the centre of the UN negotiations on climate, for 13 years in overall charge of the UK effort and for six of these years also as lead negotiator for the EU. So perhaps one useful thing I could do would be to share my knowledge about what I had seen and experienced and my observations about the future challenge.
The longer I have worked on the climate crisis, the more worried I have become. As I approach my own death, I realise how insignificant I am as one individual, and how devastating climate breakdown will be for millions if not billions of people, many of whom are not even born yet. To state the bleeding obvious, this puts the slightly earlier than expected death of one individual in some perspective.
Relationships matter
It is essential as a negotiator to listen carefully to one’s counterparts, and understand what really drives their position, and to accommodate their concerns while meeting one’s own. Obviously this is far more likely to be successful if it is supported by close personal relationships. This is far more important than clever legal drafting or mastery of process.
When Eurosceptics criticised the civil service in relation to the EU it was usually for its over-rigorous implementation of legislation, or even so-called “gold-plating” of EU legislative requirements. There may be some truth in this. But it was also the failure of the civil service to understand how much personalities matter in Europe and the EU. Whether you have relationships with people and whether they like you has a material impact on how far your member state’s view will prevail. Many of the leading figures in EU environmental policy have known each other for decades. The longer the policy officials coming out from London had been in their roles, the more effective they were at helping to make the UK case, but the UK civil service constantly moves people around, particularly at senior level. I was an exception in that I remained at senior level on environment and climate for decades in the UK.
In 1994, I moved to Brussels to work full-time negotiating environmental laws and policies on behalf of the UK at the European Union. By 2015 and the lead-up to the Cop21 climate summit in Paris, I was negotiating for the EU and the UK.
Playing to the electoral base
Various individuals are described as the “architect” of the Paris agreement, or so describe themselves. I do not believe there was such an architect. The Paris agreement emerged from years of negotiations involving thousands of negotiators defending what they saw as their national interest. The eventual agreement was very near the top end of what emerged as possible from those negotiations.
On 7 May 2015, a Conservative government was elected in the UK with an absolute majority. We were happy that our new secretary of state was to be Amber Rudd, whom we knew we could work with and who would be influential in the cabinet. As EU lead negotiator, and the senior UK official, I went into the Paris meeting with some degree of confidence. A deal along the lines we wanted was entirely doable. But there were risks.
As we in the UK prepared for the Cop, we began to think about whether there were finance announcements we and our allies could make that would build confidence among developing country delegations, in particular that money would be available to support high ambition.
One area where we saw scope to generate political momentum was in forestry. In conversation with our close partners in Germany and Norway, we developed over 2015 a proposition for announcing a significant boost to international public finance on forests over the next five years, which would give forest countries confidence to aim for and deliver ambitious action to reduce deforestation. We eventually managed to agree that we could commit to $5bn over the next five years, and planned to announce this in the run-up to Paris.
Although the pledge would position the UK very strongly internationally, bitter experience had taught me there was a major risk that some of those advising senior ministers, especially at No 10, would view such an announcement with scepticism, fearing it would not be seen in a positive light by some Conservative voters. I therefore repeatedly tested the emerging proposition with special advisers and officials in both the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and in No 10, as well as with Defra minister, Amber Rudd, to confirm they were happy for us to proceed. I followed this up with a written submission and got the go-ahead.
So even I was somewhat surprised when there was an explosion of anger and disbelief from No 10 shortly before the announcement was due to be made. How could this have happened? Why were officials preparing such risky announcements without any clearance? Did they have their own agenda? Showing the disproportionate reaction of people in No 10, the incident became known as “forestgate”. Eventually it was decided that we should proceed, since not to do so would be embarrassing – and it landed very well with forest countries.
Forestgate reflected a constant problem faced by Conservative ministers in this area. They had adopted forward-leaning positions on both development aid and climate because their polling was telling them that this was the way of attracting younger voters who they were otherwise losing, yet they were constantly nervous that other elements of their electoral base were not interested in or were even antipathetic to these issues. As a result they lived in terror of the Daily Mail and other elements of the rightwing press. This frequently led Conservative governments to pull key announcements we had carefully designed to maximise UK visibility.
To Paris
The Cop was held in a conference centre beside the airport near Le Bourget, a commune of Paris about 10 miles from the city centre, and the UK delegation stayed in an airport hotel in Roissy, next to Charles de Gaulle airport. This wasn’t Rudd’s natural milieu and it wasn’t unknown for her to disappear into the ambassador’s residence in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré for a more comfortable sleep. The food in our hotel was indifferent, but I must admit that it wasn’t too bad in the conference centre, and we seemed constantly to be surrounded by the smell of baking bread and croissants.
The weather was generally cold and wet. My own situation in this regard was rendered more challenging when the foreign secretary’s envoy, David King, left the conference early and took my coat with him in error, leaving me his own. This was doubly annoying – it turned out that I was fatter than David King so his coat didn’t fit me so, as a result, I was even colder.
Net zero or no
A particular element began to gather momentum in 2015, and that was the notion of enshrining a commitment to net zero emissions on the face of the Paris agreement, crucially with a timeline. Committing to net zero is nothing new. The objective of the original 1992 climate change convention in Rio is set out in its article 2. It is to “achieve … stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. This clearly means getting to net zero emissions. Indeed, this is simple logic: if anthropogenic emissions are leading to climate breakdown and you want to stop that, there is no alternative but to prevent any net emissions. But the pressure which emerged in early 2015 and grew very quickly in momentum was to put a timeframe on this.
There was plenty of academic work which tended to suggest that keeping the temperature increase below 2C implies net zero global CO2 emissions by about 2060 or 2070. Other greenhouse gases might come a little later. Getting a collective commitment to net zero emissions in that kind of timeframe could be a massive signal to countries and to markets. The idea also began to gain momentum that countries should be pushed to set out how they would individually reach the goal of net zero, on a timescale that would represent their fair contribution. This was not without controversy.
Some in the green community feared that a focus on long-term net zero would divert attention from the urgent priority of reducing emissions in the next 10 to 15 years. Initially, I had the same concern myself, and Karsten Sach, my German opposite number in Brussels, expressed very strong views to me along these lines.
At the same time, there was hostility to the idea from many emerging economies. Li Gao, the director general of the Chinese ministry of environment, told me over an otherwise convivial lunch one day in early 2015 that China would never agree to this, and (rather threateningly I thought from a usually amiable Li) that the UK/EU would be making a big mistake if they were to push it. Nonetheless, the idea became a priority for several of our allies from the Copenhagen talks in 2009. This gradually firmed up as an EU negotiating ask, and we developed ideas for how we might formulate such a goal, and how we could encourage individual countries to set such goals for themselves.
Meet the delegates
After careful thought, the French had decided to invite leaders at the beginning of the meeting, rather than halfway through. (No one thought it was a good idea to have them at the end: we had all learned our lesson on that in Copenhagen, when the atmosphere between the various leaders became fractious and adversarial.) This did succeed in injecting some momentum into the process. I heard from many delegations how pleased they were to meet their head of government. Unfortunately, this was not true in our case. David Cameron stayed in the VIP area and did not meet the team. To be fair, the first minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon did make the effort to talk to us and I had the opportunity to brief her, though I did find something about her somewhat chilling. Ed Miliband, the former energy secretary, also took time out to meet the full delegation.
Once leaders had departed, negotiators began to work through the vast range of issues where we were looking for compromise outcomes. The meetings were hard-fought. An ambitious and comprehensive outcome was certainly not in the bag.
The Cop president, Laurent Fabius, held regular stocktaking plenaries and encouraged negotiators to move faster. Behind the scenes, the US and China were clearly having lots of bilaterals, which the rest of us tended to regard with some ambivalence. On the one hand, it was clearly good they were talking. On the other, what were they saying?
Backslapping and backtracking
As the second week progressed, there was a sense that we were on track for a good outcome. The mood was positive, and there was progress on most issues in most of the rooms. On Thursday, the French produced a draft of the entire package, which was shared with all the delegations. When it was brought to EU coordination, to my surprise, Karsten from the German flag strongly welcomed the text and suggested the EU accept it as it stood. Because of Karsten’s credibility and authority, a number of ministers came in to support him, including the commissioner.
I was aghast. This was not yet the final text. Indeed, there were elements in it which would be utterly unacceptable to the EU. For example, the commitment on developed countries to mobilise $100bn a year was written into the Paris agreement itself, not into one of its associated decisions. A treaty commitment to provide specific funding would have been way beyond our red lines. But the room was in uproar with applause and backslapping.
I was sitting at one end of the table with the Luxembourg presidency, next to my shrewd old friend Francesco La Camera, and Maurizio Di Lullo from the Council Secretariat (both seasoned climate negotiators). I went to the European Commission flag at the other end of the table and expressed myself in very blunt terms to both the commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete, and the head of Directorate-General for Climate Action, Jos Delbeke, saying that if the three of us took this back to our respective capitals, we would all be fucked. I respected and liked both men enormously, and I did not want to offend them, but this was a crisis. I also briefed Rudd, who calmly took the microphone to explain to her colleagues that this was not the final text and we should not approve it. There was a gradual acceptance that she was right. It was a close shave for the EU.
One of the key issues that remained unresolved as we went into the final days was what should be said about 1.5C. This was resisted by both the US and its allies, and even the EU, as well as the emerging economies, tacitly. It was an issue that was absolutely key for many of our closest allies among the vulnerable countries, and yet we knew how challenging it would be to achieve it. We also knew that the emerging economies were giving some tacit support for the vulnerables on it, while being in fact firmly opposed to it, but happy to hide behind developed countries.
I must admit that I had some concerns that the poorest countries were pouring their political capital into changing the temperature goal. For me, the biggest issue was the inadequacy of the nationally determined commitments, particularly from the big emerging economies, and I would have preferred it if the poorer countries had focused on pressing for more immediate ambition rather than something I doubted would be agreed. I turned out to be wrong.
At a contact group held on Thursday evening, a new compromise text was circulated. It was cleverly drafted, pushing at the very edge of what many of us could accept. It was essentially the final language which would find its way into the Paris agreement. The goal should be limiting the temperature rise well below 2C, while “pursuing efforts” to 1.5C. When I asked Trigg Talley, the US lead negotiator, whether he could buy it, he sucked his teeth and suggested that the US could just about live with it. This was a massive vindication for the strategy pursued by Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands: the US did not wish to do anything which would undermine its close working with the vulnerables.
This sealed it for me. If the US could accept it, there was absolutely no way that the EU could resist. I briefed Rudd, who understandably had some concerns because this was close to a red line even for the UK as well as the EU; 1.5C is a much more challenging goal than 2C.
I said from the EU flag that we could accept it. This and the US acceptance created some consternation among the emerging economies, but most of all Saudi Arabia, who objected violently. Heated negotiations continued all night; as I recall, the Chinese and Indians were strikingly silent. Vulnerable countries like Pakistan, which is allied with Saudi Arabia in the like-minded developing countries (LMDC) group, must, I assume, occasionally ask themselves questions about their affiliations.
The second and, we hoped, final draft package was issued by the French on the Saturday morning. In a brilliant piece of theatre, the French president, François Hollande, attended with Fabius, and we were all invited to applaud the success of the French in putting the package together. Yet we had not even had the chance to study it.
Delegations then went back to their separate groups to examine the text. Overall, we in Team EU were delighted with it and reported accordingly to ministers, who agreed that the EU should support it and began some more backslapping. Rudd intervened to warn against excessive displays of satisfaction, lest other delegations might be encouraged to push back on the text if the EU was seen to be too happy with it, but this fell on deaf ears. EU ministers spilled from the room looking for journalists to announce the deal and celebrate with.
However, when the text finally came to plenary, there were some problems. A “should” had become a “shall” in a way that was unacceptable to the Americans. One never knows for sure, but this appears to have been an editorial error. There were intense discussions between US secretary of state, John Kerry, and China’s senior diplomat Xie Zhenhua, and eventually the issue was resolved, although not without calls to respective capitals, I think. There were tensions between the Africans and the Latin Americans about who should get priority for adaptation money; and the Nicaraguans had a wider problem about the insufficient contribution from developed countries, allegedly partially solved by an intervention from Pope Francis.
On the action agenda we saw really serious engagement by business at very high levels, with pledges to take individual and collective action. This was an important step, building on the vision developed in Lima. We also had agreement among many countries to cooperate on research spending, though I confess I have seen limited evidence that this is delivering tangible results.
Was Paris a success?
At the highest level, Paris was a success because it massively reinforced the collective confidence of governments and businesses in the climate agenda. Business commitments accelerated sharply. Green groups were willing to welcome Paris as a success, even though it was not nearly enough for 2C, let alone 1.5C.
At the next level down, Paris was disappointing. The aggregate impact of nationally determined commitments was nothing like enough to put the world on track for 2C. Moreover, the active discussion and pressure that the EU had hoped for on the individual and aggregate level of nationally determined commitments never emerged. Nor would it before, or at, Glasgow six years later.
The Paris agreement text itself, together with its associated decisions, was at the top end of what was doable. This was a tribute to the skill of the French in managing the process. It was legally binding to the maximum extent possible, and it had a robust framework for pushing countries to set ambitious national commitments. Indeed, it was much stronger than we had expected because of the explicit linkage to the temperature goal, which had been reinforced, and to a timeframe for getting to net zero.
Further, the rules for transparency around assumptions in national commitments were now mandatory and would help us understand better what countries were putting forward. We also had an improved approach to transparency. We had the bones of an accounting regime including an explicit commitment that there would be no double-counting: but the process for delivering this would only begin in 2021, in Glasgow; and we had a robust five-year cycle, informed by a top-down global stocktake a year or more beforehand. Finally, we had an acceptable outcome on common but differentiated responsibilities, where national circumstances would guide countries’ levels of ambition.
The only area where we had not made progress was on any formal extension of the donor base: a lot more work needed to be done not only in the UN but also in the real world to improve delivery of finance. The language on loss and damage was acceptable, with the US securing an explicit exclusion of compensation and liability, though here too there was much more to do, and delegations remained a long way apart. And there is much more hard thinking to do about how we move forward on this issue in the coming years.
Adapted from Climate Diplomat: A Personal History of the Cop Conferences, published by Profile on 28 August. To support the Guardian, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.